


Poggra-mengri (a breaking thing)

by Stakebait



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-26
Updated: 2010-05-26
Packaged: 2017-10-09 17:59:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/90053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stakebait/pseuds/Stakebait
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giles remembers Jenny, and he's not the only one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Poggra-mengri (a breaking thing)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cadhla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cadhla/gifts).



> For the Lynnevitational. Spoilers through mid season six.

  
It had been one of their best days, when Jenny took him to see the horses.

Castor and Pollux, she called them. They were hardly thoroughbreds; thick-bodied draft animals with furred feet to match their manes. The better to pull a plough with, though the tall grass the idle horses munched on had clearly not been sown by anything other than wind and time. Maybe he'd beat his sword into a ploughshare, he'd said to make her laugh, half meaning it. It was that kind of day.

"I could grow currants, which no one in this benighted country ever seems to have heard of, and sell the jam to yuppies at a fortune a jar," he suggested. "You could learn to cook proper porridge and we could live there." He pointed to the run down old trailer which the place sported in lieu of a picturesque stone cottage, reminding him that this was still California. It was likely drier, at that, and no vermin in the thatch. Charm wasn't everything.

She kissed his neck where his collar was open to the warm sunshine. "We can't," she said, but only shook her head and refused to say why, and Giles speculated about her tragic porridge accident as a child and the lifelong phobia it induced until she was laughing too hard to speak.

The horses had come to him even before she'd produced carrots from her stylish handbag, and she'd been impressed, he could tell, as much as when she'd seem him stake that first vampire and thrust her behind him, towards safety. Giles had grinned and on impulse swung himself up, bareback.

He didn't mind her calling him a fuddy-duddy, not really, not when he could see how she enjoyed modernizing him. He tried not to feel like a kitchen. But it was a pleasure, still, to do something vigorous and playful and see her eyes light up with surprise. He might not care for terrible pop music or American football, but there was life in the old dog yet.

"Rupert! They're not trained for riding!" Jenny protested, but he sat out the token rearing and the creature consented to bear him soon enough. He suspected they were bored, poor things, put out to pasture with plenty of miles left in them. Giles didn't blame her – what else was a suburban schoolteacher supposed to do with a couple of carriage horses she had inherited and couldn't bring herself to part with? – But he could see how that might feel. If – when – something happened to Buffy, if he survived it, he'd be right there with them.

Just about when Giles was ready to pray he remembered how to turn a horse with just his knees and go back for her, he heard muffled hoof beats behind him, Jenny murmuring soothing nonsense syllables that sounded half-familiar, and urging her mount on to catch him up. She'd have done it, too, if he hadn't come to the brook about then. Giles' desire to leap it in a manly bound lost out to Castor's desire to drink out of it and shake bits of it all over Giles' shirt and hair, and it all ended in laughter.

They left the horses tied up to a tree and went picking wild blackberries, in lieu of currants. Jenny's lips turned dark red from the inside out, like a flower, and Giles wouldn't dream of ceasing her futile efforts to suck the stain from his fingers. He unfolded the picnic tablecloth to use as a blanket, and if he did, once or twice, as they shed their clothing, consider that the tall grass near the edge of a wood was a prime spot for Lyme disease, he kept such considerations to himself.

It turned out they couldn't live in the trailer because someone already did, a strange old woman with white wispy hair and what turned out to be an ordinary denim skirt under an amazing assortment of shawls. She muttered and grumbled at Jenny, ignoring Giles much as if Jenny had brought a St. Bernard to take up all the room in her tiny tin parlor, but she thrust a jumble of yarn into Jenny's hands that turned out, later, to be an intricate lacy jumper, and served them both a bowl of stew from a pot simmering on a hot plate that was the best thing Giles had tasted since he came to America. Giles supposed Jenny paid the woman to look after the horses, though no money changed hands that he could see – maybe she sent a cheque, though the woman didn't seem the type to keep a bank account. Or maybe, he thought, it was Jenny's land, and she just let the woman stay to keep the horses company.

******

He'd all but forgotten that day, until he took Willow back to England and went riding again.

The light was altogether wrong, higher and greyer, even the grass wasn't the sort of grass you got in California. And the horse wore a proper saddle and bridle, and Jenny was dead. But he felt the beast move under his thighs, alien and ally, and the muscles remembered.

They weren't the only ones. Giles had let the reins go slack in one hand, letting the horse have its head over ground it knew, at this point, far better than he did, and let his mind drift to what the hell to do about Willow, who inhabited the house like a particularly apologetic ghost, trying not to touch anything.

It took him a moment to realize he'd passed the bounds of the estate sometime back. The horse brought him down the village, past it, to an encampment of Gypsies and Travelers squatting illegally on their own land. They owned it, but the planning authority hadn't given permission for them to park their caravans on it, for reasons which amounted, as far as Giles could see, to sheer bloody-mindedness.

He'd expected, what? Dancing, bright colors, flashing earrings, campfires, music, like Gypsies in the cinema, if he'd expected anything. Horses, surely. But his was the only beast in sight. There was only a row of neat caravans, modern and dull, and a bunch of silent people staring at him with sullen eyes. They watched him come, they watched him ride between them like the Lord of the bleeding Manor, which, Rupert had to admit to himself, he more or less was. They watched him go. They would, Giles suspected, watch him die with precisely the same lack of expression. Giles didn't know that he could entirely blame them.

His grandfather, he remembered, had told him of driving Gypsies off his land with a whip, before they could steal the silver or get the housemaids "in trouble," as they called it then. At the time it had seemed like quite an exciting story. Then again, he'd wanted to run away with the Gypsies, too. Childish Rupert was quite impartial, so long as something happened that was different. It had never, he realized, occurred to him that the Gypsies would be less than delighted with his eight year old company and useful contribution of toffee and misremembered punch lines. He could light a fire for them by rubbing two sticks together. (He would have assumed, if he'd bothered to think about it, they must have subsisted on cold tinned things before he came along.)

Giles felt the eyes on his back for quite a long time after he'd rounded the bend in the road. Stupid to think they blamed him for his grandfather – or for the local council, either. Stupid to think they hated him for the big house that he, as well as Willow, barely lived in. He sat up straight on the horse, because some reflexes were burnt deeper than instinct. But he came up the drive, instead of through the fields, and was ashamed to feel a suppressed shiver of relief when the big gates creaked shut behind him.

******

"Chok-engro."

Giles woke from a troubled dream of moving hay from a stack before the rotten core spread outward, the weather hot and humid, the skin of his back prickling with lightning overdue. There was a voice ringing in his head that made no sense with the scene even by dream logic, speaking a foreign language that felt half-familiar, something he might have read but never spoken.

"Chok-engro." It wasn't loud, but it was as impossible to ignore as a crying baby. It resonated through his clenched jaw.

"Chok-engro!" And now Giles was awake enough to realize what he was hearing: Romani, the Gypsy tongue. The British dialect, specifically. The word meant "Watchman." Or perhaps, Watcher.

Giles climbed out of bed, straggled into the jeans and Fair Isle jumper he'd cast aside the night before. Whatever was summoning him, he didn't care to face it in the outmoded nightshirt he'd unearthed when the advent of Willow made it inadvisable to sleep naked. She had nightmares.

It was impossible to tell where the voice was coming from. It came from everywhere. Only a strange reluctance to turn on the electric light made Giles step to the window and draw back the curtains.

There was a horse standing in the drive. All alone, without saddle or bridle, coloured so dark that he might not have told it from the tree's shadows if it weren't full moon, if it weren't for the glowing golden eyes.

It threw back its head and bared its teeth. "Chok-" it began.

Giles opened the casement. "All right," he said. "I'm coming."

He gambled that talking horses might not be precisely familiar with how long it would take to leave a house as big as that one, taking time to tuck up his sleeve some holy water and a wooden dagger that could double as a stake.

"I didn't know the Puka spoke Romani," Giles said, after he carefully relocked the front door.

"You know me," the horse said, sounding flattered. "Not many do, nowadays."

"It's my job," Giles said, somewhere between a modest disclaimer and a warning.

"This is mine," the Puka said, matching his tone. "Ride with me."

"Why?" Giles asked.

"The moon is full, the wind is cool, the wheat shall wave beneath us. It is glorious to ride free upon the night and wreak our will!"

"I'm sure, but why take me with you?"

"Because if you do not come I shall take vengeance on this place. I shall break your fences and tumble your walls, foul your wells, stampede your livestock, not once but a hundred petty disasters until I break your will."

"I meant, why me?"

"Oh, that," said the Puka in a far more casual tone. "Doing a favour for a friend."

"The sort of favour where you drown me in a stream?" asked Giles. "I _have_ heard of you."

"You have a very suspicious mind, you know that?" The Puka demanded.

Giles crossed his arms in a distinctly schoolmasterish fashion and waited.

"No, all right? Jaysus." He ducked the knee and waited for Giles to mount, but Giles was still looking at him.

"Brook, river, municipal swimming pool, other body of water not heretofore mentioned?"

"You're a clever one," the Puka said admiringly. "No drowning of any kind. Special one time offer. But I'm serious about the livestock thing. We're talking multiple misdemeanors if you don't come sharpish."

Giles' bones creaked as he mounted. There was no Jenny to impress this time, and he was getting a bit old for this sort of thing.

The moon was full, the wind was cool, the wheat did wave beneath them. It _was_ fairly glorious to ride free upon the night, Giles admitted, if only in his head. It was when the Puka took a sharp left and began to ride free upon the sea that Giles started to get a bit unnerved. The Puka's hooves barely touched the froth on the wave tips; Giles' own boots experienced nothing worse than an occasional dusting of spray. So far. But the ocean looked altogether deep and cold and full of things that might be hungry, and Giles recollected, too late, that there are other ways to die in the water than drowning.

Giles surreptitiously leaned back to pluck a hair from the Puka's tail. It was surprisingly hard to do, but it parted at last with an almost audible twang.

"What was that?" the Puka asked suspiciously.

"What?" Giles hoped he wasn't overdoing the bewilderment.

"We're too far from land for insects," the Puka continued, ignoring the question, "or pixies. Maybe an especially stupid seagull?"

"I didn't notice anything," Giles said, with complete truth.

He was no judge of time out here, with no shore for the waves to lap on and no road for the Puka's hooves to beat. There was rocking rhythm still, above and below, but in silence, and with no landmarks to judge their progress by, except a few wisps of cloud that might have been moving themselves. Thank God for modern technology – Giles watched the soft glow in the dark spot on the tip of his watchband move over quite ten minutes before he plucked the next. That time the Puka swished its tail and flicked its ears, but didn't bother to comment. Nonetheless, Giles waited 20 whole minutes before he plucked the third.

The Puka turned to look at him. It was hard to discern expressions on a horse face in the dark, but Giles didn't think he looked especially surprised at the spiderweb glints that lay across his palm.

"Would a rope made of three of your hairs make much difference to you?" he asked.

"It'd be a bloody short rope," Giles replied.

"Don't give me any of your cheek. I'll tell you, it wouldn't. Why? Because three hairs is three times as strong as one hair. Yours won't do you a lick of good, but keep on if it pleases you, by all means. I can't say I enjoy you yanking out bits of my tail but I've had worse from the midges, and it'll keep you occupied. We've a ways to go tonight."

"It worked for Brian Boru."

"No, it didn't," the Puka said.

"I've read many versions of the legend and the rope made of three hairs is one of the most common elements."

"Pardon me, I'm sure. It just so happens that my grandfather was the Puka in question. Boru caught him with a bloody great spear up under the throat and a trap about the leg into the bargain, both iron as strong as he could forge. Hairs is all invention. Just for the look of the thing, is all they put that in for. But my grandfather wasn't about to argue."

"Why not?"

"If someone put it about that you could be killed with candyfloss, would you correct them?"

"I suppose not." Giles admitted. "So it's true about fairies and iron?"

"It's true about horses and iron, and men and iron too, for all of that. Iron is stronger than any flesh, mortal or otherwise, and if you keep interrupting me I'll forget my promise and drown you after all."

"Sorry," Giles muttered.

"Think nothing of it," the Puka said graciously. But Giles, watching the dark waters roil underneath the Puka's hooves, found he could not quite obey this instruction.

"Where are we going?" Giles ventured after the Puka had been silent so long that he felt quite sure this could not count as an interruption.

"You'll know when we get there."

"How?"

"You'll not be on a horse any more. If you shut it, you might even remember how you got off."

"Oh."

******

Giles wondered if the Puka were taking him back to America, but the island the creature eventually dropped him on was little more than a collection of rocks with a few wind-bent trees straggling up between them. Perched precariously on the edge was a rusted, clapped out old trailer.

The Puka set Giles down gently enough, for all his posturing. Giles looked around for something to feed it: an apple, some hay, but there was nothing. He even patted down his pockets.

"I'm sorry," he said. "And thank you."

"Forget it," said the Puka. "It wasn't you I did the favour for."

"Nonetheless," said Giles, who felt fairly stupid arguing with a horse, but had also read more than his share of fairy tales, "When I get home, if I get home, I will leave a gift for you."

The Puka nodded. "Then I will give you my advice: tie that useless rope of yours around your finger, so that you don't forget." With a toss of its head, it was gone. Giles had never had the slightest ambition to swim the Channel, but it looked like being a long, cold slog home.

The caravan door creaked open, a sound that was strangely familiar. As was the figure that emerged. She was even older, more stooped, her shawls even more voluminous and tangling in the sea wind, but it was unmistakably the old woman who had looked after Jenny's horses.

"Avata acoi," she said. _Come thou here._ Giles realized for the first time that she, too, was Romani, and probably a relative of Jenny's. He did as she said.

"You are the one who brought shame to our Yanna."

Giles found his spine, or at least his anger. "No, you did that," he replied. "She risked innocent lives for your vengeance." And she lied to me.

She muttered something about "gadjo" and then "lubbenified."

That was a word Giles hadn't encountered in his research. He looked at her blankly.

"She became your whore," she translated. Giles slapped her across the face.

She slapped him right back, hard. The rings her fingers bristled with cut his cheek open. "Good Rom girl does not go with gadjo, does not go with any man outside of marriage. It is – " forbidden, unclean, taboo. Giles had never been sure which was the proper translation, but right now it hardly mattered.

"Would you have let her marry me?" If she'd lived.

"Good Gypsy girl does not go with gadjo," she repeated, but she sounded almost plaintive, unsure. "It is different now. Not enough of us. We lose them to the Nazis –" she spat – "we lose them to the vampires" – she spat again –"now we lose them to the towns. In the old days, they would be as dead to us. Now--" she shrugged. "We let them come back, to their families, to the fairs. Weekend Rom." The word was a curse in her mouth. "But we need the babies. No, I would never have let her marry you. But Yanna was stubborn. If she marry you anyway…" the unfinished sentence was as much welcome as she could bring herself to give.

She rallied to challenge him. "Would you have kept her pandlo in that big stone prison of yours?" _Bound, imprisoned._

"No, Grandmother," Giles said, daringly. She did not slap him again. Perhaps that was permission, or perhaps she was only husbanding her strength. Giles meant what he said. He understood about the far places destiny could take you, and anyway a man couldn't get to near forty single without learning to keep his own company. Not that it mattered now.

"Would you have given it up, to travel with her?"

Giles was silent a long moment. It had never occurred to him, in all the time since he had learnt she was a Gypsy, that Jenny would want that life, would miss it. First he hadn't known, he excused himself, and then he'd been too angry, and then she'd been too dead.

But it hadn't been wholly that. Giles squirmed uncomfortably. In some ways Rupert thirty years on was not so different from Rupert aged eight. What happened before he came on the scene hardly existed. He'd worried, of course, that Jenny might not be willing to take on the burden of being a Watcher's wife: the late nights, the wounds, the secrets, sharing him with a Slayer. But he'd never bothered to wonder if Jenny would be willing to, quite literally, settle down at all. Much less considered whether he should be the one to change his life to follow hers. There was Buffy, of course, for a handy excuse, but that didn't hold much water when he'd chosen to leave her 6,000 miles away.

Giles realized the silence had stretched. "No," he said at last. He might have traveled with Jenny – he just couldn't think of her as Yanna -- for a while, for summers, for a year or two. But not forever. If he was a fuddy duddy, then so be it. He liked his tea things as he left them, he liked the deep old shine of layers of wax on wood, he liked to know what season it was before he opened his eyes by the way the light came through the tree by his window. The big old place might suck up everything he'd inherited and then some but the smell of it, the hay, the hedges, the horses, were too deep in his blood for him to give it up forever. He might never feel properly at home there but it pulled him back, just the same.

"At least he's honest," she muttered to an unseen audience, and Giles realized he'd passed a test of sorts, though what he was being tested for he didn't know.

"How did you dook the gry?" She asked him. _Bewitch the horse,_ his brain translated a few seconds late.

"I didn't," Giles said, honestly. "I tried the Brian Boru trick, but it didn't – wait." He hadn't actually tried it, had he? He'd braided the hairs, all right – and then taken the Puka's word for it that it wouldn't work. "I think the horse bewitched me instead."  
She didn't laugh. "That is often the way of it. Love is a del-engro." _A kicking-horse._ "You can ride it if you are brave, but you never know who has the chukni wast," the whip-hand, "until one of you wants to stop."

"I didn't want to. She was killed!" Giles protested.

"And if she hadn't been?"

Giles thought it over. The sea wind cut right through even the thickest knitted wool, and he felt as if he were naked. "I don't know."

He wanted to say, "of course we'd make it work." He wanted to say, "We'd have three children by now."

"I don't know," he said again. He'd have had to get to know her all over again, all the parts she'd hidden. He would still love her – if what she'd done hadn't killed that, nothing ever would – but he couldn't swear it would have been enough.

Giles was crying. He didn't remember starting to cry, not even that moment of dry straining before the tears come. He just _was crying_, as if it had started a while back and he'd only just noticed.

The old woman disappeared back into the caravan. Maybe she was bored with him. Or maybe men crying was deeply shameful in Romani culture. Giles had no idea; like so much else, he'd never thought to ask.

She came out again, carrying a jar of something brown, and handed it to Giles, who took it with automatic, bewildered good manners.

"Er, thank you?" he said. "You're too kind." What he needed was a boat, or a seaplane, or a flying horse with an attitude problem. What he had was a big brown jar of slop and an old woman glaring at him.

"This is the stew of Yanna's family," she said. "When my mother married, grandmother gave some to her, like this, to put in the pot of her new family. That pot simmered 20 years, and then my mother gave some to me. I gave some to Yanna's mother. Yanna's mother would give to her, but Yanna never marry. She go to university, to this place, that place, but never a proper caravan, or even a gadje house. Keep it for me, she said, until it is time. Like the horses. But her mother die. Her uncle die. Yanna die. There is no one left. So I give it to you. You don't want to be bothered keeping it going, eat it in front of the telly. Give it to someone. Throw it in the sea. I don't care."

She stomped into the caravan without a backward glance and slammed the door behind her until it rattled on its hinges.

Carefully, Giles took off his jumper and wrapped it round the jar, then tucked it into a crevice between rocks, a little out of the wind. He unwound the three plated hairs from his finger, coiled them into the semblance of a bridle, and whistled.

"What am I, a fooking pony now?" asked the Puka, as if he'd been there all the while. "I speak English, y'know. And Irish. And Romani, which is more than you can say." But he stood there, trembling slightly, and his flanks were dark with sweat. "Mailla and posh," the Puka said. "Ass and foal, I always was a fool." He stretched his head out through the circle until the bridle fell about his throat.

Giles gathered up the jar hastily and scrambled onto the Puka's back, one handed, as well as he could.

"What's that?" The Puka asked.

"Leftovers." Giles said. He stroked the Puka's mane with his free hand, and stayed quiet all the way home.

******

When he dismounted in the drive, the sky was lightening behind the house. It would be dawn soon. He lifted the bridle from the Puka's neck.

"It didn't bloody work, you know," said the Puka. "Just 'cause I did you a bleeding favour, don't go getting any ideas."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Giles assured him, and fetched him a couple of apples and a bucket of clear water. "There'll be a portion for you, when the harvest comes in."

He hesitated. "Listen," Giles added at last. "There's a couple of fences and walls could do with knocking over. I mean, if you're ever in the neighborhood…" down where the estate met the Gypsy camp. Let them come into the grounds, why not? They'd get more use out of it than he did. And the stiff necked old grandparents' day was over.

And while he was at it…"there's a bloke on the local planning authority could use his head forcibly removed from his arse."

Horses don't grin, but Giles could swear the Puka smiled. "Maybe I'll take him for a wee ride."

******

Giles made his way down the servant's stairs to the old kitchen, with its huge inefficient hearth and scarred oak table. He dumped the jar of stew into a heavy iron pot and put it on the cooker to heat, then dug a few potatoes, carrots, a withered turnip out of storage, peered into the freezer for a packet of meat that wasn't too freezer burnt, cracked open a bottle of wine to thin the stock.

"Something smells good," Willow said from the doorway. It was the first unsolicited comment she'd offered since he brought her to this place.

"I'm making stew," Giles said. He handed her a knife and deliberately turned his back, stirring the pot. He remembered the prickly feeling of his dream, waiting for the lightning. But when he turned again Willow was sitting at the table, inexpertly peeling potatoes.

"Why don't you have a peeler like normal people?" She demanded.

"You Americans have gone soft," he answered, smiling.


End file.
